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Comment by midgetjones | Hacker News Reader

This looks really good! I used to use org mode as part of my daily workflow, but now that I don't have to submit timesheets I've got out of the habit.

At the time, though, it was wonderful. Once I'd spent some time getting used to org-clock, it becamse a much less intrusive workflow than switching apps to log time. Plus, you get beautiful tables at the end of it detailing your day, and all your notes for each item if you need them.

I even wrote some (probably terrible) elisp to collect my day's time data and post the items to our timesheet API. Mainly so I could show off to my colleagues, but also something I would never even attempt in Vim.

Edit: found it! https://pastebin.com/6EksUxAh

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Hmmm. Personally I'm currently using Toggl: even though the backend is proprietary, the Mac tool is lightweight, well designed and, curiously, open source. However, I could use some divorce from proprietary services sucking up my detailed time records.

Could anyone please comment as to how Org-clock's recording interface compares to Toggl? Especially, can it respect me going afk and count it as a break after five minutes? Toggl has a great dialog for this, amounting to ‘stop or continue.’ As for the reporting side, I mostly need just a summary of my time-wasting achievements over a week.

I suppose that Org-clock doesn't leave the confines of Emacs itself? Which must limit its abilities in measuring the activity.

See the variable "org-clock-idle-time". This is Emacs, so of course there is an option.

I'm not sure if I would use org-clock unless I were already programming in Emacs, but since that's mostly what I'm doing, it works great to keep track of contracting time.

Now that I think of it, system-wide idle time is available on Macs via a terminal command, or on the three platforms with a few lines of C (https://github.com/anaisbetts/node-system-idle-time). So I guess that's solvable. A system-wide popup might be harder, though.

Personally I could see myself using org-clock in isolation, even if just for the fact that I end up with a non-proprietary log. I've lost too much history to various different tools (some of them turned out less than ideal, some just went belly-up).

It's difficult to know though, because I started using org-clock alongside org-mode, and if you combine time-tracking with outlining, journalling, todo/project management, and a calendar, all of it well integrated, it's hard to imagine switching to something else.

EDIT: also, just remembered that one reason I quite using Toggl was that clocktables turned out much more powerful for analyzing/reporting my hours.

Any deficiency in the elisp is made up for by this: (insert ":(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)")

Well done!

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